Grizzly Man: The Way of Things, W.H.
The question I hoped to answer upon seeing “Grizzly Man” was simply that of why Herzog elected to tell the story of Timothy Treadwell. Treadwell seems immediately an odd object for the fixation of Werner Herzog -- he, resembling no one more than that saint of American cinema, Jeff Daniels, with a penchant for manic bitching and loopy invectives before his stationary camera which seem only comic in effect, seems at best a strange recipient of Herzog's empathy. It's certainly not easy to stop seeing Treadwell as a comic figure -- and he has, to some degree, contrived his before-camera persona, but we see that as he leaves the camera rolling, pieces of the man emerge. Herzog understands this principle intimately: leave the camera rolling for long enough, after the subject has finished his or her elicited commentary, and the performance gives way, awkwardly, to natural being. I think the reasons Herzog gravitates toward this narrative are many and clear, and can be teased out, for the most part, by examining the ideas and convictions manifest in many of his other films and writings.
The story of Grizzly Man was a brutal endorsement of Herzog's view of nature: vindictive, cruel, impersonal, murderous. But also, he had to be attracted to the personage of Treadwell, as an individual who willfully interjected himself into this brute equation. With the exception of some general confusion about the ultimate permeability of nature, Treadwell fully understands and accepts the conditions upon which he is allowed to live with the bears. One can counter that death is the ultimate refutation to any of a person's claims, for death seems to be the one intractable fallacy. When one dies as the result of his own “flawed” logic, on our way of thinking, his argument is surely unredeemable. This dismissal is evident in the testimony of the helicopter pilot who retrieved the remains of Treadwell and his girlfriend, and thoroughly faults Treadwell for their deaths. But that's making a straw man out of a corpse. In a way, yes, death is the ultimate mistake. But (while having his story remain his own), we can maintain that his death, no matter how eventual its nature, was still the product of events outside his control, and so his culpability is questionable. Another filmmaker -- any other -- might have concerned himself primarily with this question. But Herzog seems instead to be concerned with the extraordinary nature if Treadwell's "leap" - that is, the ultimately irrational but nevertheless willed decision to believe something that one cannot himself justify believing. In this way, Treadwell believes that nature is monadic and works toward good ends, even if this requires that bad things happen to people and animals. (Many people have made this leap.) What is extraordinary about Treadwell's story, though, is that this leap makes possible another, even wilder leap -- that, armed with this knowledge, he was fit to enter the animal world. Paradoxically, it was a world of chaos, brutality, and luck that he willingly accepted when he made this vow. Herzog, flying over the glaciers with his camera, points out the fractured and chasm-riddled icefield, the barrier between the world of people and Treadwell's world, noting that it must mirror the torment in Treadwell's soul; the collateral damage of the ruinous interplay between his radically, cataclysmically inconsistent beliefs, a fight as bitter and eviscerating as the bears' death match that Treadwell's camera incredibly captures.
Both Stroszek and Kaspar Hauser (like Grizzly Man, passion plays) explore the compromise, exploitation, and eventual destruction of a "holy fool" character, by social forces. Elsewhere, as in Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre, et al., he explores the destructive power of nature by bringing a single man into conflict with it. Given these two streams that run through his work, it's not hard to see why the story of Treadwell fascinated him. Here was his "holy fool", a man whose innocence was so unblighted as to believe that he could exist safely among a pack of bears simply by "loving" them enough, and who is ultimately destroyed by placing his trust in the wrong institutions or ideas -- in this case, the "anti-institution" of the natural world. Also, there are hints that he saw in Treadwell a shadow of his beloved avatar Klaus Kinski, as during a long and explosive invective directed at the Park Service, Herzog mutters in a voice-over: "I have seen this kind of anger in front of a camera before."
Among the reasons that Herzog treasured Kinski was that the latter was able to express in a more direct fashion the rage that drove him: he flung it back at its sources, while Herzog's own rage drove him deeper into the jungles, directed his inquiry, was a bile that ate away at the edges of his questions until they became sharp, jagged, incisive. He sees the same in Treadwell - he's the vital, conflicted force that the camera captures, and he's also the one to document it, having himself been driven deep into the wild. Herzog believes that Treadwell's footage shows us more about human nature than wild nature -- or anyway, he's more interested in exploring the former through Treadwell's astounding footage.
For Treadwell, embedding himself with the bears was not a rejection of the view that nature is uncompromising, veering between malice and indifference, but rather an acceptance of these terms, resulting in an informed decision to live by its terms. (He confuses an “ought” with an “is”, accepting a provisional, disagreeable "is"). After all, he must have reasoned, bears kill bears too. While Herzog is clearly skeptical of Treadwell's motives, he ultimately seems to accept the man's decision as being an informed one, but seems to hang between presenting it as rational or irrational. Whether it is internally consistent with his beliefs, or requires a leap, is the question Herzog's treatment brings up, rather than the shallow "can we blame him, or not?" In the sense that he could have avoided the risk by electing to study the bears in a different and less dangerous way, it looks as if we can assign culpability on the condition that he could have done otherwise. But could he? Herzog's conviction is that Treadwell had little choice: he was, in another sense, torn apart by devils of his own creation. Living among the bears was his way of losing himself; he reasons that the only possible way of negating the despair which is the congenital lot of humanity is by becoming “as a beast”. This is his impeccable judgment; it is the only one that matters. And it is correct. This is the heart of the film, and above everything else, this is really what engages Herzog. The ultimate loss, and the one least noticed, is the loss of self, a brutal transaction which Treadwell knowingly initiates. In order to survive himself, he must willingly make the one intractable mistake of existence, which is self-estrangement. The notion of accountability can hardly hold upon the revelation of this decision, and ultimately, this dilemma informs Herzog's attitude towards Treadwell as a figure whose ends preceded his means - the prescription for tragedy, but also for a kind of robust living impossible without this inversion of priorities for which one must, ultimately, pay dearly. Having been taken by that same sort of reckless life-urge in the personage of his dramatic partner Kinski, and having put it into every character that's "lived himself to death" in a film, Herzog's desire to illustrate the world in terms given by these men of incendiary passion is apparent. It's clear that Herzog has added Treadwell to his pantheon of beloved madmen.
-Theresa Smith
1/24/06 posted by: George More so than Jeff Daniels, Timothy Treadwell evokes a marginally talented shadow of Woody Harrelson. Treadwell’s parents identify losing the part played by Harrelson in “Cheers” as the Hollywood moment experienced by so many failed actors that triggered (or rather confirmed) his spiraling descent into depression, loathing, identity dislocation and drug/alcohol problems. Where Harrelson, another tortured soul who fled to the Dream Factory, proceeded to comfortable success and popularity whilst cultivating benign quirkiness as that least destructive variety of druggy, the pothead, Treadwell became a pathetic stereotype of goofy Hollywood degradation, an aspiring actor and uncontrollable alcoholic working in a ridiculous theme restaurant, eventually retreating from society yet still compulsively filming himself in character. It is never in question that the “Grizzly Man” is a shabbily conceived and unconvincingly realized construct of a man who once tried to move in Los Angeles as an Australian without mastering even a broadly convincing accent. Treadwell himself is a comic figure of such thoroughness that the man could not play such a funny creation if he were trying (he doesn’t have the actual talent). One wonders if he realizes just how silly he looks and sounds at all times and gets the feeling that he does not. Where we see a clown he perceives himself whole heartedly as a gentle warrior, though on some level he has enough self-awareness or self-doubt to methodically produce the video footage necessary to artificially create this persona. When he addresses the camera in dispatches usually intended to have immediacy or profundity, he does several takes, often affecting different tones, presumably with a mind toward offering choices in the hypothetical editing room. He clowns through his flubs in a manner as incongruous with his subject and surroundings as Orlando Jones portraying a jocular O.J. Simpson on “Mad TV” in the blooper reel to Simpson’s infamous video arguing the case for his innocence. If a “Mad TV” reference seems inappropriate in reviewing a film by the man(iac), the legend, the Werner Herzog, then consider the sequence where Treadwell contrives sequences of B-roll of himself vigorously stalking through the maze, camera in hand, like a dandified Indiana Jones, doing each take in multiple bandanas (for continuity), and apparently oblivious to the degree to which footage of himself on the move with his camera will inevitably reveal the artifice of his saga of self as grizzly man. This would not be out of place on early “Mad TV”. Of course, the dark heart of the concealed, “real” Treadwell does emerge in the footage Herzog includes that Treadwell inevitably would have avoided. Herzog makes blatant the process of Treadwell attempting to create his new persona in opposition to the human civilization he finds it increasingly difficult to function in. The tragedy is that Treadwell never attains any honest understanding of the reality of life among wild bears, partially because he never resolves his disappointment with society (or show business) and himself, and stubbornly projects a naïve, sentimental fantasy upon his wild environment that is more a reaction against the human world (i.e. his own personal demons) than a reflection of the cold, predatory environment he has chosen to flee to every summer. Treadwell tells himself, and everybody else, that he loves animals and is doing an ill-defined service of protecting bears, though how his antics are of benefit to the grizzlies is never clearly explained. He believes the bears need him, and he is projecting. Treadwell is described in his pre-grizzly man existence as suffering from the bi-polar cycles familiar to many actors. This torment is evident in the awkward moments Herzog includes from Treadwell’s vast video archives. Early in the film, the more clownish, giddy side is emphasized. The stranger expressions of this mania include his enthusiastic wonder over fresh bear shit. Toward the end, we get to see the lows. His need to sentimentalize a nature where animals tend to kill each other emerges in several sequences where he despairs over the cruelties of nature in a high pitched whine, most comically over a bee he erroneously thinks has died in the act of pollination. But Treadwell does, surprisingly, begin to evoke the driven madmen played in Herzog’s fictional efforts by Klaus Kinski, in the second act, in the desperate rants Treadwell is compelled to tape. See the grizzly man puzzle over his difficulty with women and the benefits homosexuality could have offered him! See the infamous Treadwell turn against the National Park Service (i.e. the good guys) in a possessed vitriolic stream of profanity tastefully narrated over by Herzog! See the non-religious bear lover demand rains from the most popular deities…and get it! By the time of his death, Treadwell has crossed the line into the suicidal determination (and, to some degree, presumption of godlike invulnerability) of Aguirre, willfully returning to live with unfamiliar bears after balking at an airline employee who dared to be fat, rude, and human. The rightness or wrongness of Treadwell’s lifestyle is not of importance here. That is the aspect some find to glom onto, but it is the simplest, and least fruitful. Few would argue that living among wild bears and disregarding longstanding, sensible barriers regarding interaction with them is anything but foolish and life threatening. Yes, it is a shame that his girlfriend was also torn apart by a big bear, but it seems a tad condescending to her to blame Treadwell for her fate, as if a woman is not capable of recognizing the risk of following a man into the woods with a bunch of bears. Anyway, these are not the issues Herzog (whose productions have killed people before) is interested in. The interesting question to ponder is: what leads a man to seek out this situation? The distinction between narrative and documentary is more irrelevant in Herzog’s work than most directors. His fictional films are steeped in reality in the style of their production. Not the Dogme 95 immature aesthetic, ironically wholly cosmetic, concept of reality, but in the very approach to every aspect of production (hey, let’s really haul a boat over a mountain! I’m going to hypnotize all of you!) that produces majestic brutal images that cannot be faked. His documentaries are informed by a naked subjectivity and authorial voice controlling the story as well as a filmic aesthetic counter to the cinema verite heuristic saying that truth must be shaky, poorly focused, and guilelessly edited. Further muddying the importance of such a distinction, Herzog has faked documentaries well. This is refreshing and necessary in its reversal of common reductionist wisdom regarding documentary film. In many of these aspects, he is in the same strata as Errol Morris. Herzog, an acquaintance, didn’t believe that Morris would ever complete a movie. Morris finished “Gates of Heaven.” Herzog, making good on a promise, ate his shoe. Really, it was filmed. |